Aug. 22, 2014
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A man militants claim is journalist Steven Sotloff is shown in a video. / Islamic State

by Roger Yu, USA TODAY

by Roger Yu, USA TODAY

Shortly before he was captured by terrorists in Syria, freelance journalist Steven Sotloff had enough peace of mind to share his wonder about the status of the center position of his beloved Miami Heat.

"How much of an impact with big man #GregOden have with #MiamiHeat next season?" the 31-year old Miami native tweeted on August 3, 2013. Then his Twitter feed went silent.

The tone of the message stands in stark contrast to Sotloff's searing debut in the American public consciousness Tuesday, when his Islamic State captors released a video of him kneeling, presumably in a remote part of Syria. It was the same infamous video that included the beheading of James Wright Foley, another American journalist who was freelancing in the region.

While media trucks and reporters camped out in the Sotloff family's house in Pinecrest, Fla., his parents - Art Sotloff and Shirley Pulwer - and family members have kept silent behind closed shutters and police patrols. Frank Castle, the boyfriend of Sotloff's sister, Lauren, has promoted an online petition urging government action to free him. His family presumably continues to work with the highest levels of the government in its attempt to seek his release. The congresswoman who represents their district, U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., said she has had multiple talks with the family.

Sotloff's writings, social media clues and a few media interviews given by friends in the immediate hours after the video release reveal an up-and-coming reporter with a yearning for adventure abroad and an obvious passion for the region.

Reporting voluntarily from Aleppo, Syria, near the Turkish border - Syria is now considered the most dangerous journalistic assignment - Sotloff filed stories on a freelance basis with numerous publications, including Time and Foreign Policy, and remained moderately active on social media. One video shows him on the streets of Aleppo as a bomber flies overhead.

Like many freelancers in the region, he was drawn to hottest stories, regardless of the risks. He lists Benghazi, Libya, as his residence on social media and reported vigorously about the fatal U.S. Embassy attack in the city in late 2012, appearing on Fox News to offer his account and report on his interviews with guards at the compound.

Sotloff's love of writing and the Middle East was evident early, his college roommate, Emerson Lotzia, told the student newspaper of their alma mater, the University of Central Florida.

"He loved to write and worked as a freelancer for the Central Florida Future (the student newspaper owned by Gannett, which owns USA TODAY) during his time at UCF. He was big into politics and always had his eye on the Middle East," Lotzia told the UCF Knightly News. "He talked about traveling there to cover the news."

Sotloff was well aware of the dangers of the job, Lotzia told Central Florida Future. "A million people could have told him what he was doing was foolish, it seemed like it to us (as) outsiders looking in, but to him it was what he loved to do, and you weren't going to stop him. Steve said it was scary over there. It was dangerous. It wasn't safe to be over there. He knew it. He kept going back," he said. (When USA TODAY contacted Lotzia, a sports journalist, he said he wasn't conducting any more interviews at the request of Sotloff's family.)

In addition to his love of basketball, Sotloff has a range of eclectic interests, from the jazz of Miles Davis and the movies of David Lynch to cooking shows and the poems of Beat Generation icon Allen Ginsberg, according to his Facebook account.

Also evident in his digital footprint, not surprisingly, is his interest in geopolitics. Lawrence of Arabia is one of his favorite movies, and journalist Lawrence Wright's gripping account of the rise of Osama bin Laden, The Looming Tower, seems to have been an inspiration.

His friend Anne Marloe told The Daily Mail that Sotloff had lived in Yemen for years and spoke good Arabic. "He deeply loved the Islamic world," she said.

Listed on Facebook as one of his favorite quotes is a plea from the late American diplomat George Kennan to refrain from simplifying our foreign enemies: "We Americans like our adversaries wholly inhuman; all powerful, omniscient, monstrously efficient, unhampered by any serious problems of their own, and bent only on schemes for our destruction. Whatever their real nature, we always persist in seeing them this way. It is the reflection of a philosophic weakness - of an inability to recognize any relativity in matters of friendship and enmity."